Harvard Business School Press Goes Web 2.0

The publicity team at Harvard Business School Press is using del.icio.us to store and distribute PR hits they get for their books. It is a great use of the technology and something I have been pushing a number of publishers to do. Julie, Erin, Sue, and Michelle at HBSP get credit for doing it first.

Here are four reasons why I think every publicity department should be using del.icio.us:

1. You could create an internal database to do the same thing. Del.icio.us is available right now, and you could start bookmarking in under five minutes.
2. You have internal and external customers who crave this kind of information - sales, marketing, editorial, other PR groups, authors, fans of your authors, fans of your imprint. Del.icio.us is open to everyone and easy to use. We at 800ceoread have plans to stream these links onto the book pages of our ecommerce site.
3. You can see how many others in the del.icio.us audience found the media pieces interesting. In the case of HBSP, the Washington Post's Best Books of 2006 article was the most bookmarked with 22 people. This is not a definitive measurement in any way, but can act as indictator of geninue interest in the hits you do get.
4. Bookmarking PR hits can be a way for you to introduce new articles to the del.icio.us community. This idea has the potential for the most user backlash. The HBSP team handles this risk well by making clear who they are and where the links are coming from. This method also has the most upside. Most of the bookmarks for HBSP publicity are the first in the system. By tagging bookmarks with appropriate words, users who are monitoring those tags via RSS will see articles that may of interest to them. This brings a secondary audience to the hits they have already gotten (Juile-call me, we should talk about this).

Kudos again to the HBSP Publicity Team. I love this!